Visions of Grandeur
by TriscuitTheFlyingSnkCracker
Summary: Nither Angel or the Powers That Be can fight all the battles. Soon an unlikely hero, Allen Francis Doyle, will have to fight without the help of his friends, and try to escape with his sanity in the process. Pity nobody told him that.
1. Prologue

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Disclaimer: The characters aren't mine, but from what I've seen in the last three seasons, _Joss can keep 'em._ I'm watching the show now and I don't even recognize the hollow shells that call themselves 'Willow', 'Giles', and 'Xander'. 

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Author's note: First serious fic, so if it's crap, bear with me. Not Doyle-centric (remember Doyle?) but he does play a major role. It's a WIP, but I promise to have a new chapter up every 2-3 weeks (depending on the length of the chapter). 

In case you didn't get the insinuation in the Disclaimer, I don't like much of what happened to the show mid-season 4 and on. So I chucked it. That's why this story will start off completely canon, but may diverge a bit in later chapters. If anyone in the same camp as me would like to feed me plot bunnies for my next stories, I'll be more than welcome.

Feedback is good, like certain types of cheeses. But not that funky blue cheese stuff. 

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Dedicated to: Beta Reader and longtime girlfriend, Becky. 

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Setting: Early season four BtVS, first season AtS. 

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Parings: By some freak coincidence, I've picked a time period where _all_ the characters are single. But still, it will develop into Buffy/Angel, Willow/Xander, and Doyle/Cordelia. 

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Prologue

Dream On

This is odd...

On some empty, unnamed street of L.A there stood a man. His blue eyes glinted as he looked up into the light of the full moon.

He blinked reflexively, unused to the harsh white glare. 

He looked around nervously, trying to find out where he was. His brow furrowed, confused.

__

I've been here. 

He tried to think abstractly to work it all out, then he gave that up. He tried just to think, to try and understand what was going on. 

No good.

It was Los Angeles, City of Angels in Spanish, a sort of New York with palm trees and smog. He looked up, and the fact that it was a brilliantly clear night unnerved him more. Where was the comforting haze of man's contribution to nature in the sky?

Suddenly he was walking, without wanting to. He now had to go somewhere and it was essential that he get there as fast as possible.

He didn't know _why_ though.

The fog rolled in. 

__

Fog? In L.A? He wondered

He ran through the streets, until the roads between the buildings became smaller and smaller. The skyscrapers still towered above and around him, but the roads gradually became hallway size. He ran on, twisting and turning in the labyrinthine city.

And then he heard the voice. A sirens call, singing his name.

__

"Doyle."

Where before he had felt a sense of detachment from the dream, he now felt that he was a part of it. To the credit of his imagination, he didn't know if this was a dream of not, because it seemed like one of those dreams where you don't know if you're awake or sleeping.

He suddenly heard a piano being softly played behind him, its notes reflecting and refracting off of the silent towers of glass and steel above him. His vision was slowly breaking apart, the moon was beginning to strobe and- 

His body turned to meet the music.

There, sitting at a piano in the middle of the narrow street, was a woman of breathtaking beauty, wearing a black dress, with skin pale and cold as the moonlight that illuminated the skyscrapers above.

Doyle knew immediately that she was something special, untouchable, and immortal.

Her fingers drifted ethereally over the ivory-white keys, barely seeming to touch them, but bringing out deep, bittersweet chords. Her back was to him as she played, and she gave no invitation, but Doyle walked to her. He came up to her slowly, not wanting to stop the music. 

He slowly extended a hand and brushed her coal black hair away from her shoulder, touching her pale white skin.

Then the music changed, harsh and deadly like chilled poison. Doyle's hand shot back as if it was stuck by lightning. He had done something terribly wrong.

The woman's face turned, with a motion slow and fast as time itself. Her features reflected the black-on-white look of her dress and skin, and her dark eyes looked into Doyle's eyes like he was... _nothing_, staring at his naked soul.

He gasped.

He tried to blink, or to put up some sort of mental barrier to break the connection. For a fraction of a second he did, and he blocked her.

The way a man blocks a tidal wave by holding up his hand.

He felt her enter him, wash over him

Doyle screamed.

He screamed so hard that he almost woke up. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

To Be Continued…

(So, huh? How was it? I know it was only a dream sequence and all, but what? Too wordy/Not wordy enough? Constructive criticisms and other feedback's will rewarded with a cookie!)


	2. Visions

Author's note: Okay. There's some serious lag between when I published the last chapter and this one. Errrr.... sorry. I'll start putting some serious kick-ass effort into this story once I get a few more chapters up. Which is hard, because it's tough to know which bits of a story are really necessary to a story, so I've been very tentative in what I post. Hey, if I took everything I wrote and stuck it on the site, I would have a 20,000 word story going here, it just would probably just _suck_. That's why I believe in quality over quantity.

Okay, I'm a little embarrassed about this part, but here goes. Quantity vs. Quality is not the only issue making this story move as slow as an asthmatic ant in no-man's-land. There's also one concerning plot... i.e. I had no idea where the hell this was going. My original vision of grandeur (and that's a phrase you'll be hearing a couple more times, and which is looking a might better than 'Hero's Journey' for the name of the fic.) had the entire cast of Angel _and_ Buffy, plus my O.C's and contained something 15-16 characters. Now, unless you're re-doing _War and Peace_, that's kinda big for a 17-year old writer to be working on. I realized that if I ever wanted to finish this, it was going to have to be shortened if I wanted to finish it before I was out of college.

So instead of the usual pruning everybody does to edit, I had to essentially drop Agent Orange on my story to _defoliate_ most of my writing. I figured which characters I needed, lopped off about 7 that I didn't and adopted a 'Scorched Earth' policy on the Buffy sub-plot that was in development. Xander, Willow, Buffy and Giles are now twiddling their thumbs in the back of my hard drive, probably never to see the light of day again. shrugs shoulders Meh.

And after all of this, after the hacking, slashing, burning, and gnashing of teeth, my new plot stood there. It was good. It was reasonable. It was, most importantly, something that would not take Tom Clancy or Steven King to write.

And here's the first bit. Enjoy!

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Visions of glory, spare my aching sight!

-Thomas Grey

Chapter One

Visions

In the City of Glass stood a woman, robed in black. Her garments seemed to billow and swell around her slim body, even though there was no wind between the towering skyscrapers of carved glass.

She regarded the figure in front of her. He was starry-eyed and disheveled young man in a hat and brown overcoat who looked up at her with bewildered fear, like a rabbit who has just seen the headlights of a truck on a lonely road, and decides the best way to deal with them is to stare them down.

In actuality, he was thinking, but he was thinking so fast that his thoughts kept whirling around in his mind not going anywhere. _She's gonna kill me. Where am I? I think I'm gonna be sick. I should run. It's your own damn fault, and you know it. How is it my fault?! I should run, just get away while I still can._

The woman started to slowly walk towards him. _It's now or never. Run. _Run_. Run!_

He moved his foot backwards, preparing to turn around and dash, throwing caution to the wind. The woman's eyes moved to his foot. They narrowed.

Then he screamed, staggering back as if hit with a fist, and crumpled into a heap on the road.

The man's name was Allen Francis Doyle, and he was about to die. His face contorted into a horrible grimace as gut wrenching, gnawing, constant fear grabbed his stomach and bowels. He screamed again, louder and hoarser, and then blindly tried to stagger away from the woman, who merely had to take a few steps to catch up with him. He was yelling with panicked terror, running, falling, running again, falling once more, and finally sprawled on the empty road, gasping like a fish for air.

He couldn't scream any more, his lungs had burst. The woman walked leisurely up to him, and extended her finger. She was just about to touch him, to send him over the edge, to make him _insane_, forever!

Suddenly there was a tremor. And that turned into a rumble. And then that turned into a shaking. The woman was knocked off her feet and fell painfully onto the ground.

There was a voice, that broke the empty silence like a loudspeaker. "Doyle!"

And then the City of Glass started to collapse. The massive skyscrapers started to topple, and huge panes of glass dashed themselves to bits as they hit the ground.

"Hey! Man! Wake up!"

The whole city seemed to fade, and then swallowed itself up into blackness.

"Get up, man!"

He was being shook.

And then suddenly the odor of cheap cologne assaulted his senses. His eyes snapped open, and he saw two beady eyes glaring into his own with a look of intense concern.

"Hey! Hey! Wake up, man!"

"Wha-What? I'm here." said Doyle eyes still shut, vocal chords strangely rough, and breathing at a breakneck pace.

"Are you okay man? You look like you just had a fit or seizure or something" said a shadowy blur above him.

His eyes were too blurred to make out anything. He blinked quickly, trying to focus. He recognized the figures as his next door neighbor, Jeff something-or-other.

He had never really got close to his neighbors. No reason to. He just left them alone and they were happy to return the favor. Now he found himself wishing that he had gotten to know the man's last name.

He looked up at the Jeff, trying to figure out what two and two were. "I was?" he asked, shaken.

The beady eyes squinted suspiciously. "You ain't on any drugs, are ya?"

"Wha-? No.. No drugs," answered Doyle, still breathing fast. He didn't notice before, but his bed was drenched in his sweat.

"'Cause I had a cousin once that got a load of bad valium-" the man continued, mostly to himself.

Doyle managed to say "_No drugs_.". and then a thought occurred to him. He lifted his head and stared at the man.

"How did you get in?" he asked slowly.

"Simple man! This!" Jeff proudly presented a bit of wire hanger between his thumb and forefinger. "I used to steal stuff sometimes. Not anymore though."

Doyle groaned, let his head fall back on the pillows, and realized _why _he didn't talk to these people.

Doyle sighed. "Right."

"So, you like, gonna be okay?" said Jeff nervously.

"Peachy," he said sarcastically.

"Sure? 'Cause if, y'know... if you need help or something."

Help?! his mind spat. What the hell was an abstract concept like _help_ doing in L.A?

"I'm fine."

Jeff just stood there for a bit, neither of them sure what he was about to do. He made a disconcerted wave 'goodbye', and then started to walk out.

"Wait!" Doyle yelled to the man who was now creeping to the boltless and chainless apartment door. He kneaded his brow, trying to think of something deep and profound to say to leave them on good parting terms.

"Look…."

What comes after look? He wondered.

He cleared his head and thought of a whole sentence to come after 'look'. "Thanks man. Come back tomorrow and I'll buy you a round at the pub to make up for it."

The man's face split into a grin wider than a kid in a toy store. He nodded, then made for the door. Doyle spoke softly to him as he was halfway out.

"I owe you one."

The man shut the door with a soft 'click'

"So where am I?" he mumbled. _Apartment_, his brain told him.

"How'd I get here?"

You woke up, said his mind again.

"Okay. Where did I wake-?" then he stopped. He remembered the nightmare, or what the hell ever it was. He knew about nightmares, and he knew about visions.

This was neither, but it was more like a nightmare than a vision. He had the feeling that it had been _real_ though. But nightmares always seemed real when you were having them.

His stomach curled up on into itself as panic gripped him. _What if _this_ was still the dream?_ He didn't _know_ if he had a neighbor named Jeff. It could all be some wild hallucination.

He groped around at his bedsheets, his bed, his other arm, just needing to see if something was _real_, if he wasn't just in another dream.

He grabbed his arm and twisted some skin right above the wrist. It hurt. Good. That was reassuring.

A little too reassuring.

"Ow."

His brief shot of adrenaline from the panic had taken it's toll, and now he felt, well..._immobile_. He felt like there would be nothing better that to just... lay his head down... take a nap...

His head shot up again. _No, no, no, no. Going to sleep means picking that nightmare up exactly where I left off._ He yelled at his stubborn body to stay awake.

No good. He was going to need some sort of stimulant. He sat up in bed and massaged his eyelids, considering.

He knew for a fact that Earl Mackenzie down the stairs was supplying the whole building with methamphetamiens, and he toyed with the idea of knocking on the door and calling in a favor.

Nah… knocking on a junkie's door at three o'clock in the morning… excellent way to get shot.

He shook his head and thought of alternatives. _Ahhh... Now there's an idea..._

He swung his feet out of the rumpled and drenched bed. He found his pair of dark-green slippers and walked over to what the greasy landlord called the 'Dining Room' when he sold him this hellhole of an apartment.

A cockroach zoomed past his feet. Doyle made a half-hearted attempt to squash with a slipper.

He missed, and sighed. "Shite."

His apartment was the low-rent of the low-rent really, and the people in it were similarly inclined. If the building was blown up tomorrow, the world would loose 400 bookies and small time drug dealers. _Well_, the thought came to him_, four hundred bookies, dealers, and strange guy named Jeff_. _He's not too bad_.

On that thought he trudged on like a turtle through two foot snow toward his kitchenette, towards his goal. _Coffee, _his mind bleated. He bent down and rummaged through his fridge, searching for the coffee. He stopped on a likely container. He lifted the lid, and stared at it.

The remains of Sun Tzu's Chinese Takeout stared back.

Doyle got nervous, and shut the lid. It had been in there for God knew how long, and Doyle was afraid that if he didn't pitch the damn thing now, it would evolve and demand voting rights.

He felt around in back grabbed a can of Folgers and made himself a glass, sipping gingely at the piping hot tap water he had mixed it with.

He stirred his coffee contemplatively. He was gradually waking up, and wanted to do something he hadn't in a long time. It was something he had done when he had asked if the apartment had a view. The management had laughed and pointed a greasy finger to his window, which faced a rather picturesque brick wall. When the management had left, he had stuck his head out the window, and been rewarded with a nice view of the stars.

He grabbed his mug and walked over to the window and opened it, letting the cool night air drift in. He smelled the air. It smelled like somebody had been frying goats in it. No matter...

He pulled his torso out of the window and sat on the edge, holding onto the window pane above him. He looked down. A drop of fifty feet was below him.

It'll be okay, I just haven't got to slip, that's all.

He turned his head and looked up, between crack of the two apartment buildings. He got a surprise. Normally the thick smog of L.A blanketed out the night sky, but tonight the stars shined with a bright fury, no smog in sight. "_Wow" _he softly said, and set the coffee mug aside to rub the sleep out of his eyes.

And at that moment, it hit him.

A dance club, maybe two or three blocks away from here, it's music thump-thumping into the still night air. A few freelance hookers prowl the streets, but aside from that the sidewalks are all but empty. The dance club again. It's a very nice, very tacky building for this part of down. It's glossy glass doors open, and a girl walks out. She's tall, thin, brunette, well dressed, and looks out of place in the seedier parts of L.A. He can only see her back. Through the blinding pain he wonders if it's Cordelia, the attractive girl who knows Angel. She turns, and he realizes that it's not her.

She ducks under the velvet rope and walks out down the sidewalk. Her high heels making a clipping sound as she walks out into the night.

The doors of the club open again...

This time a man steps out. He sees the girl, and grins carnivorously to himself. He withdraws a pocket digital camera, and walks on after her.

The girl clips along, oblivious to the man tailing her. She's heading home to her apartment, about five blocks away.

The man walks faster, closing the gap between them. Fifteen feet. Now ten feet. He's five feet away from her-

And then she ducks into an alleyway. It cuts off five minutes from her walk home.

The man grins, unable to his luck. An alleyway would be the perfect place. As he grins, his face slides back and up, his face rearranging into a predatory mask. His canines elongate further and further, until they are inch-long fangs.

He is a vampire.

He follows her into the alley, takes two running steps, and grabs her shoulder. He whirls her around.

She screams, at first because of the shock of being grabbed in a dark alley, then because of his face.

"Good! That's great! Just hold that-" _says the vampire, and whips out the digital camera, sinking his teeth into her neck as he takes a picture._

FLASH!

__

CRASH!

Doyle came to, with the vision still sending his senses reeling. He looked back and forth, wondering where the crashing noise had come from. He looked five stories down to the pavement below, and saw his glass mug of coffee lying in shards. When the vision hit, he had knocked the mug off and it had dashed itself against the ground below. But why hadn't he fallen?

A blast of pain from his left hand told him why. He was clutching the windowsill with a death grip, and it was starting to cut into him. He grabbed the sill with his other hand for support, and cautiously slid back into the apartment, breathing very hard.

He gingerly examined his hand. There was a quarter inch depression and he couldn't feel his fingers, so it was probably out of commission for a while. _Never mind the hand_, he told himself_, go!_

The place he saw the girl was about a three minutes run from here. His visions, he knew by experience, were either things that were happening, or were going to happen soon, so time was not on his side. He though of calling Angel, and indeed he was halfway across the room to the telephone before he realized that even if he did call Angel, right now, the only thing he would find was a dead girl.

No time to wait about. He grabbed some clothes and threw them on, picked up a couple weapons, and grabbed his hat and overcoat and ran as fast as his legs could take him down the hallway.

"_Why the hell do you want me? I'm a messenger! I don't _do_ combat!"_ he yelled through the ceiling to the Powers, as he raced down the corridor. He reached the end and jabbed at the down button to the elevator. He waited two jittery seconds before he took the emergency stairs, taking them three at a time. He blew out of the apartment building like a small hurricane and dashed out into the street.

The club was two blocks south, and he ran like the devil himself down the empty streets. How much time did he have? Two minutes? One minute? Was he too late?

He passed the club, it's stale music still thump-thumping into the night. He slid to a halt in front of a big, black and beefy bouncer the size of a small truck in front of the door. The if the bouncer noticed he existed, he didn't give any sign of it.

Doyle hesitated, realized that this man's job description said nothing about talking, just keeping people like himself out of the club.

He started to talk anyway. "Hi." he said, skipping the introductions "Did you see-"

A scream broke the silence of the night to the left of him. The bouncer might have been dead for all the reaction he gave.

Doyle tipped his hat.

"Never mind."

He ran judging the crossbow into his hands. He saw the alleyway, and it was as in his vision. The girl was backed into the wall, screaming incoherently. Doyle saw the vampire and didn't blame her. He was a scary bastard. Doyle tightened his grip on the crossbow and brought it level with the vampire.

"Hey!"

He tried to think of something clever to say after 'Hey!' but nothing really came to him. So much for the pithy James Bond image he had of himself.

The vampire turned to look at Doyle, with a look of exasperation on it's face. Doyle noticed the small pocket camera in his right hand.

"Can you leave?" he asked "I'm tryingto _eat_ here."

"Back off from her." he said, in a voice that wouldn't have intimidated much of anything, and failed to phase the full grown vampire standing in front of him.

The vampire didn't move.

"I said _back off. Now!_" said Doyle.

"Back away from her," said the vampire, smiling and raising his hands in a mock gesture of surrender. "Like _this_?"

Before Doyle could do anything, the vampire had grabbed the girl and swung her around in front of him, putting her in the line of fire. The vampire saw the startled look on Doyle's face, and his mouth broke out into a mocking grin of triumph. The girl's eyes darted around, and then locked on to Doyle's.

He got the feeling that she was trying to tell him something...

"What're you going to do? Shoot me? She dies." The vampire continued unnecessarily, rubbing a long finger up and down the girl's neck.

The girl's eyes waved from left to right, and Doyle understood he silent message.

No...

What the hell was she playing at? Was she just going to let herself be slaughtered? Then Doyle noticed her hand drift slowly down to her handbag, and saw her fingers wrap around something. _Mace?_ he thought wildly.

"Well, she's gonna die anyway, so-" The vampire swung his head down to her neck, and just before the teeth dug in, the girl's hand shot out of her purse, holding a Colt .45 revolver. She quickly slid it around behind her and fired two shots into the creature's torso. The muzzle flash lit up the alley, and the sound of the gunshot drowned out the yell of pain from the vampire.

He staggered, knocked back by the force of the bullets, and the camera flew out of his hands and clattered somewhere as it hit the ground. The girl raised the gun again and wildly pulled the trigger, spraying bullets everywhere.

Even from here, Doyle could see that she was a lousy shot. The magnum's recoil jerked her hand up every time she fired, and most went wild. However, he had to cut her some slack. If this was your everyday serial killer, he would have been long dead by now.

The vampire staggered back, pounded by the sledgehammer beat of the bullets into the alley wall. Dark red blood was dripping out from the holes in his chest onto the ground. The vamp's eyes closed. Doyle didn't know if he was riding out the pain, or just savoring it.

The grill grabbed at her purse again, this time producing a sharpened piece of wood. _Knows the territory, this one_, thought Doyle. _Hell, she's better armed than I am. _He decided to let the girl finish the job. Why did the Powers call him for this one anyway?

The girl with the stake was moving cautiously over to the motionless creature, making sure it was... well, _what_ exactly? Doyle had never seen a vampire knocked out before, and they were already dead so...

It's a trap!

"Get away from him!" Doyle yelled, cursing himself for being so stupid. He jerked up the crossbow to chest level, just as the girl took a stab straight at the vampire's heart.

The vampire's eyes flashed open, and his hand snatched the girl's had in midair and gave a violent twist, and broke it with a loud _snap._ She screamed, and tore loose her arm from the creature's grip, her wrist bent at an unnatural angle.

Doyle saw his shot and took it. The crossbow bolt leapt at the vampire with a _phhhwet_ and missed, hitting him in the shoulder. The vampire jerked back with recoil, and then looked at the shaft of the bolt in his arm, with a look on his face that said: _Y'know, tonight just isn't my night.._

With a savage backhand to the head he knocked the girl out cold on the alley floor. He had bigger fish to fry. The girl he would eat later, right now he had to deal with this asshole that had had the good sense to stay out of the fight for this long, and should have kept on staying out of it.

He let out a low growl.

Oh, sh-

The vampire lunged at Doyle, knocking him down onto the ground. His head hit the asphalt hard enough to rattle his eyeballs in their sockets. His hat flew off, because it's very difficult to keep a hat on while a hundred-eighty pound vampire is pinning you to the ground, squeezing the air out of your lungs. In another moment the vamp would have recovered, and then start choking him.

With a surge of adrenaline from knowing he was a dead man if he didn't act, he propped up his knee to lift the vamp's full weight off of his lower body, and then rolled out from under him. He spun around still on the ground, and thinking _Hey, this guy's tougher than me, but if I keep on dodging-_ when a black boot come from nowhere and connect with his chin.

His head snapped back, and he keeled over, off balance, back onto the ground. He felt warm blood rush into his mouth with a sickening metallic taste.

Stupid, stupid, fucking thing to do, should've just shot at him and then run for it. Great job, Powers. When I get up there-

The vampire lunged at him a second time, this time using trying to use his sheer weight to crush Doyle's lean frame into the asphalt. Doyle weakly put up a foot to catch him, but it buckled under the pressure. The vampire pinned him to the ground, smashing Doyle's shins into the ground so badly that he knew that any moment now, one of them would snap in two. He realized with the way things were going, in a minute's time, he wouldn't be worrying about his shins anymore, so he ignored the pain for now.

The vampire grabbed his head between his hands, and Doyle knew that the fatal _snap_ would come soon. But it couldn't resist a last indulgence.

"Any last words, punk?" said the vampire.

An idea came swiftly into his head. It grew, becoming a focusing point for all of his strength, his rage, his indigence that _he_ was going to die in some back-alley in America.

"Yeah," he said, biding his time, trying to get his wind back. "Mate... I'm more," he mumbled "than meets the eye." He sucked in a huge breath-

And let out a tremendous cough, which had the double effect of spraying blood all over the creature's face distracting him, but the sudden shock was just strong enough to produce the _change_.

His pale white skin mutated into something green and leathery, and his internal organs spit and rearranged nauseatingly. But as always, the his most distinguishing feature after the _change_ was his face.

No longer were his eyes the light robins-egg-blue. The were now as red as blood and burned like hot coals in his sockets. His face changed the same color as his skin, only half inch bright blue spikes shot out of it, a distinguishing feature among Bracchen demons.

"Demon!" the vampire yelled in a mixture of surprise and anger.

"Yeah, _Demon_." said Doyle sarcastically. The vamp tried to snap his neck, but you can't _do_ that to a Bracchen demon. Doyle's neck twisted one hundred and eighty degrees. He snapped it back.

The vampire looked at him in shock, then curled his lip and drew his fist back for a punch.

Both Doyle's arms and legs were pinned, the only thing that was free was his head. He butted it, straight into the vampire's face and the spikes made a sickening _squick_ as they sunk in. The vampire screamed in pain (a beautiful sound to Doyle) and yanked his head back. The spikes had made horrible pockets and bloody gashes in his face. He rolled off Doyle, clutching his face with bloody hands and yelling.

Doyle stood up, wobbling slightly, even with his slightly increased muscle. He plunged his hand into his pocket, and grabbed the stake he had taken from the apartment. He kneeled in front of the vampire, and with all of his strength, he drove the stake into the heart of the still-moaning vampire.

The vampire exploded into dust, leaving a fine powder over the spot he had lay. Doyle brushed himself off, and stood up. Now about the girl…

He turned around, and was surprised to see the girl standing there, a couple of yards away from him. He was even more surprised to see the gun in her hand, pointing at his chest.

"Guess what I found?" she said, her voice trembling like the gun in her hand.

Doyle stood there, completely still. He analyzed the situation. If he turned back into human, she would probably shoot him during the change. If he tried to jump aside, she would shoot him. Ditto if he went for the gun. _What abut talking to her? Could I get her to trust me?_ No. Nobody trusted a demon, especially one covered in blood that might or might not be his own.

There was nothing to do.

Ah. It was a good run...

Doyle closed his eyes. He relaxed. He noticed he was feeling kind of-

BANG!


	3. On Into the Rabbit Hole

Author's Note: Oh God. _This _one damn chapter was so hard to write, it wasn't even funny. One thing I feel that I need to address: Doyle's accent. Let me just get this straight right now, I come from midwest America (Remember? The people shooting guns into the air and making moonshine? That's us.) and, therefore, while I know enough not to let Doyle say 'Y'all', I _can't_ know the dialect of the lovely and miserably wet Emerald Isle. So after several ("Bloody hell!"- intensive) failures, I dropped the faux Queen's English and just went to plain American. So, if you actually live in England or Ireland, and you yell at the screen, "Doyle wouldn't say that! You suck! Blah-blah-blah-we-drive-on-the-left-side-of-the-road-cakes!" I'm sorry. If it's major, tell me and I'll try to change it.

Cheers!

**On Into the Rabbit Hole...**

_**The spirit has its homeland, which is the realm of the meaning of things.**_

Saint Exupery,_The Wisdom of the Sands_

"Oh no. Not here again."

The words echoed around him, rebounding off the walls of the glass city in multi-layered echoes. Somewhere off in the distance, churchbells tolled the witching hour.

He was standing on the same street in the same strange city as before. Vast, skyscraper-like buildings rose up above him. In fact, they could have belonged in L.A, or New York, or a dozen such cities across the globe. But for one exception. They were made of glass.

But not any type of glass that Doyle had ever seen. This glass caught the light streaming in the stars above, and twisted it so it gave the appearance of shape, and form, where there was none. He turned his head, ever so slightly, and the patterns of the light danced and re-settled, forming new patterns and shapes, so he could have sworn that the previous pattern had never existed.

He unglued his eyes from the buildings and looked for anything down the street, partially hoping, partially dreading to see the same strange woman in black, tickling the ivories of a old grand piano.

"Hello?" He yelled, not expecting a response.

He got what he expected.

"Is anybody here?" he shouted.

"Is anybody here?" the city yelled back.

Nobody.

He walked on down the street, his footsteps echoing off the walls around him. There were strange street signs on every conrner, but written in some language he couldn't understand. Since he couldn't read the signs, he decided to go straight. He noticed that the buildings were starting to show color now, a dart of crimson, or green, or violet, all which would disappear if you looked at them straight on. But if he just looked out of the corner of his eyes, he could see it.

As he walked further still, the colors became more vibrant, more happy, and he started to see them more clearly now. It was like the city was just having a good time. He could even almost hear jazz music playing in his head.

No. Wait. He wasn't just hearing the music in his head, he was _hearing the music_. Somebody, in this empty city, was playing jazz. With a good beat at that.

He felt his heart beat faster as he ran on down the street, excited. The colors in the buildings were practically dancing now, tapping their shades in rhythm to the tune. The buildings finally reached a cul-de-sac, and at the end was another building, it's brick facing out of place in the crystal city.

Above it was a blinking neon sign:

The Astral Bar & Grill

The jazz music was coming from the inside.

Well, Doyle did know bars. And since there was nowhere else in this city....

He walked to the door and pushed it open. Looking through the cigarette smoke haze, he saw the usual bar crowd. People smoking in corners, not talking much. People in large arguments over small amounts of cash. The scene freaked Doyle out, in the way that only ordinary things in unordinary places can. Seeing a bar in the middle of this city just seemed a little, anticlimactic.

Nevertheless, he strode on in.

Instantly the it all stopped. The jazz music, the conversation, everything. Every head in that place turned and looked _directly _at Doyle.

He got real nervous real fast, but continued on up to the bar. He seated himself, and signaled the bartender, who was washing an beer mug, seemingly oblivious to the bar's reaction to his presence. She walked over to him.

"What'll it be, hon?"

Doyle shot nervous looks around the bar. They reminded him of pirates. He had never liked pirates.

"Bourbon, please." he said, shakily.

The bartender seemed to consider this for a minute, and then shouted to the rest of the bar, "He's all right!"

Whatever she did, it worked. Gradually the stares went away and the conversations began again, as if he had never walked in. The bartender came back with his bourbon and poured him a shot. He drank it down greedily.

"You look like you had a rough night."

Doyle remembered the first dream, then the vision, then the fight, then the girl with the gun, and had to nod.

"How did you know?" he asked.

The bartender shrugged. "I know that look." 

"So... Where am I?" Doyle asked taking another grateful sip of bourbon.

"In the Astral Bar & Grill."

"I know _that_. Where else am I?"

She gave him a sympathetic eye. "Don't worry. Everybody's a little confused when they first come here. You'll get it."

Doyle laughed, mainly to keep himself in good spirits. "I don't suppose you've ever heard of The Powers that Be?"

The bartender frowned and thought. "No. What are they? Some kind of gods?"

"Ah, you could say that. I'm a messenger. I was thinking maybe they brought me here."

"Now why would they do that?"

"Beats me. They're not big on telling people their game plan."

"So how _did_ you get in?" asked the bartender, refilling his shot glass.

"I told you, I have no idea. I was just walking through the city-"

"You came in through the _city_? Current rider, huh?"

This didn't make sense to Doyle. "What?" he asked.

"You say you don't know how you got in. I'd bet you anything it was the current." Still seeing the look on Doyle's face, she went on. "This place isn't in the physical, honey."

"Physical?"

"Yeah, you got your physical body, your mental body, your astral body... That's what you're in now, by the way-"

"Wait wait wait," Doyle interrupted. "If I'm not here, then where's my body?"

She shrugged and lit up a cigarette. "Didn't you say it was lying dead in a ditch somewhere?"

"Yes."

"Then why aren't you getting back to it?"

Doyle looked at her like she had lobsters crawling out of her ears. "That's what I've been _trying_ to do!"

"Doesn't look like that to me. All you've done is order a drink."

"Look lady, body or not, there's always time for a bourbon. But suppose you tell me how to get back to my world then?"

The woman chewed on her cigarette thoughtfully. "It's like this, see... your astral body's got strong tethers to your physical one, right? But sometimes you can stretch those tethers. Like when your mind wanders, and you go places, y'know? That's your astral body, going where the physical can't. But sometimes, when your astral body wanders off like that, it gets swept up by what we like to call 'The Current'. And then you wind up here."

Doyle looked around. "At the Astral Bar and Grill?"

"Nah. In this world."

Doyle considered what the woman had said. "I" he said, trying to was being _shot_ at. That's not exactly the best relaxation technique."

The bartender shrugged her shoulders. "I hear they say that the prospect of imminent death relaxes the mind."

"So AK-47's instead of stress balls, right?"

"Whatever floats your boat."

"That's great..." Doyle said, rolling his eyes. "Look, I love the bar, love the drink, sticky floors, whatever, but I _need_ to back into my body. Y'know, tell it to duck? So what do you have to do around here to get back to your real body? I don't think it's as easy as clicking your heels together three times and saying 'There's no place like home'?"

She cast him a wry smile, and said. "Okay, look. It's really easy-"

"Good." said Doyle.

"If you're the Bhudda."

"Oh."

"And you'll probably end up in a coma or a vegetable if you do it wrong."

"Sure." said Doyle. He did a double take. "What?!"

"Relax. I'll help" she said hastily. "Okay, first you've got to have something to focus on."

"How's about this bottle of bourbon?" Doyle suggested. "And exactly how many times have you done this?"

"With humans?" the bartender thought, chewing her lip. "You'd be the first."

"Ter-riffic." muttered Doyle under his breath. She heard him.

"Hey, it's not my fault that you people can't see what's staring you straight in the face! But you're a seer, which means you have a better chance than most."

"That's comforting. I think."

"Relax." assuaged the bartender.

"I'm a betting man. What are the odds of me coming through this in once piece?"

The bartender 'Hmmmm...-ed' and said, "The smart money's on your brain overloading on the way back, but you don't have much choice, do you?"

"I suppose you're right. What do I do?"

"First, we have to set up." she said. Out of nowhere a neon sign appeared, the message _You Bet Your Life!_ __glowing. Underneath, a chalkboard had appeared listing the various odds of Doyle's uncertain fate.

Spliched - Even money

Insanity - 1:3

Comes back, minus a limb or two. - 1:4

Comes back as a vegetable. - 1:10

If that vegetable is an eggplant. - 1:18

Botches it, destroys the world - 1:25

And then at the bottom, in tiny print.

The whole damn plan actually _works_. - 1:50

And in even _tinier _print.

The plan works, he gets to the bottom of this, becomes a hero, AND he gets the girl. - _Any Takers._

This had attracted the attention of the patrons of the bar. Rowdy shouts of "Spliched! Spliched!" came from the back.

"Spliched?" asked Doyle. He hesitated. "What, exactly, is that?"

The bartender shrugged her shoulders. "Let's just say that you end up with the right bits... just in the wrong places."

All the blood drained from Doyle's face. He just had had a vivid mental image of him wearing his spleen for a hat for the rest of his life.

The bartender saw his reaction, and offered up a sympathetic bottle of rum. "Here kid. Have some of this. It'll steady your nerves."

Doyle looked at it, trying to ignore the stream of people wandering past his stool, placing there bets on whether he _died_ or not.

She nudged the bottle of bourbon in front of Doyle's nose.

"Here, kid. I feel bad for ya, what with you about to die and all-"

"Hey, I've been almost killed twice this night. Why stop now when I'm just starting to enjoy it?" asked Doyle.

The bartender rolled her eyes. "Look kid, do you want help or not?"

"What've you got in mind, love?" asked Doyle, toying with the bottle of bourbon.

"The way I see it is this. Your astral body is gonna 'snap back' into your physical one any second now." She put up her hand. "That's what's gonna kill you."

"Go on." said Doyle.

"Well, it's like you just jumped off a skyscraper. The fall ain't gonna kill ya. The sudden stop will. Here it's the same way, only here the ground is your body. You don't get back to it right... _splat_."

"So how do I avoid, er... _splat_-ing." asked Doyle.

"Concentrate," said the bartender "on the bottle."

"You mean the bourbon bottle? Are you mad?!"

"_Concentrate_."

"Okay, okay..."

"That'll do. Now, look into the bourbon. What do you see?"

"A bottle of bourbon?" ask Doyle quizzically.

"Yes, but what do you _see_?"

"It's still bourbon."

"Come on." she cajoled "You're the Seer. What do you _see_?"

"Nothing. There's noth-" he spat, impatiently. Then he caught a flicker, and stopped speaking. The flicker of something that was there only for an instant, then it vanished.

Instantly, time seemed to slow. Off in the far, far, distance, he could hear the bets stop. The chips were down. Now it was time for Doyle to play his hand.

He relaxed, and let his mind wander. The bottle grew, and swelled, until it took up his entire field of vision. The amber liquid grew deeper, and darker, and darker, until he couldn't see anything. He was gripped by the heart-numbing cold of non-existence. The icy blackness wrapped around him, trying to strangle the warmth from him. He struggled, panicked, and as he did so the blackness stole more and more of him away.

Then at the last moment, from out of the darkness, he heard a voice that could have belonged to anyone, but it reminded him most of that bartender. A voice filled with an intangible wisdom.

"All reality starts out as empty space... then we just... **fill it**. 

With that, the world suddenly snapped back into existence. Doyle opened his eyes.

And had no idea where he was.


End file.
